TATJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
University Albert-Ludvigs, Freiburg, Germany,
University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy,
Department of English Studies, Novi Sad
DOI 10.5937/kultura1443118M
UDK 821.111.09-31 Смит З.
82.09
originalan naučni rad
ZADIE SMITH’S IRONIC
NARRATOR: THE
MANY TRUTHS OF
MULTICULTURALISM
Abstract: Irony mocks truth in language by always implying at least
two possible meanings: the literal and the figurative one. As such, irony
as a figure of speech is conducive to the topics of Zadie Smith’s writing.
The omniscient narrator of White Teeth tells the story of a transnational
metropolis in an elaborate, ironic tone, verging on parody, in order
to bring out the multifaceted and complex relational network that
underlies the identities of the 20th century Londoners. The slippage and
ambivalence inherent in verbal irony reflect Smith’s multiethnic setting,
where no easy labels of identity apply, just as the meaning of an ironic
utterance is not singular and is subject to multiple interpretations. The
narrator of White Teeth conveys irony on the extradiegetic level with
the function to expose how living in a multiethnic society leads to a
deconstruction of the subject’s identity and his deeply-rooted, dogmatic
truths about himself and the undying Other.
Key words: Black British fiction, narration, irony, multiculturalism
Black British Fiction: A movement from
the margins to the centre
The writings of Zadie Smith are commonly subsumed under the
umbrella term Black British fiction, which is a comparatively
recent notion in literary nomenclature that calls for some
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TATJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
explanation. Black British literature encompasses texts written
in English by people of Caribbean, Asian or African descent
from former British imperial colonies who have either
immigrated to Britain or have been born in Britain by immigrant
parents (Wambu n.pag.). Black British fiction sprang from the
experiences of the first black wave of immigration that ensued
after the decolonization process in the mid 20th century, evolving
gradually into a body of versatile, yet thematically coherent
works. Notable authors who marked the first wave of Black
British writing include Edward Braithwaite, George Lamming,
V.S. Naipaul, Roger Mais, Sam Selvon and Wilson Harris, among
others. These young and thriving writers relocated to London
from the West Indies as already published authors, in need of
the resources of the metropolis for furthering their careers.1 Ball
observes how, as a group, the young Caribbean authors were
the first to write about “the (post)imperial metropolis from the
point of view of the empire’s former subjects” (110). Their
narratives show London as an embodiment of imperial legacy,
a city that perpetuates racial segregation and social stratification
typical of the life in colonies. A notable example of this stage is
Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, a novel about immigrant
disillusionment with the metropolis’s hostile hosts and slender
chances of social, financial and romantic fulfillment. Written in
a heart-warming, humorous tone, and more importantly, lending
authentic Carribean creoles to the narrative voice, the novel
addresses problems of poverty and isolation of the West Indians
in London, a rapidly expanding transnational cosmopolis, which
these early postcolonial denizens help to transform into a “world
city” it is today.
The work that truly put the Black British fiction on the map of
British literary scene, in a turbulent decade when immigrants’
rights were battled over on London streets in riots and marches2,
was Salman Rushdie’s widely praised Midnight’s Children
(1981). The novel communicated with its literary predecessors,
but exhibited boldness and innovation which forcefully defied
marginalization. This is probably the first Black British text that
was not strictly labeled “Black” or “Commonwealth”, but was
admitted into the “holy canon” of British literature as its rightful
member3. The novel heralds a new generation of authors who
moved from the themes of postcolonialism typical of the first
1 Dabydeen, D. and Wilson Tagoe, N. (1997) A Reader’s Guide to the
Westindian and Black British Literature, London: Hansib Publishing, p. 83.
2 For a thorough description of the 1980s race politics in Britain see Gilroy
(1987).
3 On the resistance to inclusion of Black British authors in the canon see
Brennan (1990).
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TATJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
generation to the post-racial narrative of the rapidly changing
multiethnic Britain that was by now the country of birth for
many of these writers. The set also included Buchi Emecheta,
Grace Nichols and Mike Phillips, to name but few (Wambu
n.pag.). Already in 1974, Buchi Emecheta’s was one of the few
black female voices to be heard on the British literary scene. In
a novel poignantly entitled Second-Class Citizen, the Nigerianborn Emecheta recorded her private experiences of racism,
motherhood and domestic abuse, delivering a damning verdict
on both the oppressive Nigerian patriarchy and the disinterested
British institutions which fail to protect her from them. Hanif
Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) is another groundbreaking text which compellingly explores the complex mixedrace heritage of its main character, the young and resourceful
Anglo-Indian Karim, who opens the novel with words that
would become the leitmotif of the new generation of Black
British writers: “I’m an Englishman born and bred, almost”
(Kureishi 3). Kureishi’s much acclaimed novel proposes
alternative and amorphous models of identity, marriage, race
and gender relations, and it followed the success of his equally
controversial screenplays My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) and
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987).
Zadie Smith, herself half British and half Jamaican, belongs to the
third wave of Black British authors that mostly comprises writers
born and raised on the British soil. Unlike their predecessors, the
characters created by these authors feel at ease in their urban
surrounding and are more successful at reconciling their British
nationality with their non-British ethnic roots. This is partly so
because Britain is the only home they have ever had, and partly
due to the fact the times are changing to their advantage. At the
turn of the century, white British racism at length subsided to
give way to a new era of welcomed cultural diversity and more
or less harmonious cohabitation, encouraged by the demands of
global economy and the law of the capital. Though there are still
frictions between the dominant and the minority groups, these
are today perceived as an exception, rather than a rule. It is easy
to infer that the main concern of these British-born descendants
of immigrants or mixed-race couples, therefore, is no longer the
economic and cultural exclusion, but defining one’s identity in
such a chaotic and diverse multicultural setting. Themselves
often racially hybrids, recent Black British authors write of
young people of fluid identity, less tied down by their roots and
burdened with the past. They write of full-blooded Londoners
who are, as Ball suggests “on the move and on the make” in the
capital, with their eyes set on the future (224-25).
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TATJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
The second and third generation characters of Black British
fiction, however, time and again revisit the question of who they
are and where they come from. Their values are often in conflict
with the values of their parents. They are forced to negotiate
with the dated attitudes of the older generation, which results in
an uneasy compromise. The differences between the immigrant
parents and their increasingly anglicized children often make for
a wider gap than the one that may exist between these youths
and their English neighbours. Adebayos’s Some Kind of Black
is representative of the 1990s tendencies in Black British fiction
to relegate the narrative of the older generation (parents of
the main character) to a lesser status, while emphasizing the
coming-of-age experiences of the street-smart protagonist Dele
and his sister Dapo, as they waver between rock and a hard place
in the confusing and often violent urban theatre of mid-nineties
London. These youngsters move about the city with zest and
confidence of locals, while it is their non-assimilated parents
who are portrayed as blocking figures, confound to the domestic
realm that shelters them from an alien cityscape.4 Some notable
names of the early 21st century Black British literary scene
that tackle the theme of not simply acculturation but, more
interestingly, of reconfiguration of identity in London’s multiethnic communities, are Monica Ali,5 Meera Syal6 and Andrea
Levy.7
Irony as the stylistic choice of postcolonialism
Zadie Smith’s novels White Teeth, On Beauty and NW portray
transnational cityscapes, primarily that of London, and are
as concerned with the indigenous city dwellers as with the
immigrant experience. Zadie Smith is intent on finding what
happens when the paths of socially and racially different
Londoners cross in the interstices of the metropolis. As her
novels suggest, the outcomes of these encounters are highly
unpredictable and they trigger a chain of ironic events. Smith
employs irony both on the level of narrative transmission and on
the plot level to explore how living in a heterogenous, multiethnic
society influences the characters and complicates their sense of
identity and truth. Irony is a particularly apt stylistic choice for
Smith as it lends itself well to the larger thematic concerns of
her work. Ironic ambiguity serves to undermine her characters’
exertions to achieve a “pure” identity and deconstructs their
historically constructed truths about homeland, culture and
4 Ibid.
5 Ali, M. (2003) Brick Lane, New York: Scribner.
6 Syal, M. (1999) Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, New York: Picador.
7 Levy, A. (2004) Small Island, London: Headline Book Publishing.
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ethnicity. For instance, irony thwarts the Pakistani born Samad’s
and the Caribbean born Hortense’s adherence to a racially and
culturally definable personality. It also hinders their British born
children and grandchildren, Samad’s twins and Irie Jones, in
transcending their parents’ inherited truths of origin, and the
future predicated on this origin, which these children strive to
escape. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, irony instructs
them.
Irony as both a figure of speech and a situational concept seems
to be conducive to the topics of Smith’s writing. Smith employs
both situational and verbal irony to point out the multifaceted
and complex relational network that underlies her characters’
identities, which is also how ironic meaning is achieved. The
slippage of meaning and ambivalence that are at the core of
irony are also inherent in Bhabha’s concept of cultural hybridity,
which denotes a conglomerate of the colonizer and the colonial,
devised in his milestone text of postcolonial theory, The
Location of Culture8. Irony is a fitting mode of writing for Smith
because it shares something in common with White Teeth’s
hybrid characters who have to negotiate their identities in the
contemporary multicultural London. The world of White Teeth
is shaken to the core by hybridization and this is highlighted
with the fact that the narrative is not confound to the immigrant
experience. The Chalfens, representatives of the dominant
white English middle-classes with their unassailable tradition
and coherence, encapsulated in their pretentious self-coined
term Chalfenism, undergo tectonic changes from the moment
their paths cross with the multi-racial Joneses and the immigrant
Iqbals. In time, faith and science, history and memory, destiny
and chance, Britishness and Otherness, fanatical Islam and
fanatical Christianity all collide to produce exciting results
and realignments of loyalty, culminating in the triumphant and
utterly ironic escape of the experimental mouse at the novel’s
end. Irony comes as a comic punishment to all the characters
who get caught up in cultural stereotypes, the commonly held
“truths”, about their neighbours or themselves.
8 Hybridity has been attacked by numerous scholars. One such text is Antony
Easthope’s article “Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity” where the author states
that the concept of hybridity is analogous to Derrida’s difference (only
appropriated for the colonial context) and that it suffers from the same
flaws as Derrida’s term. Namely, just as Derrida avoids defining presence
that would have to have a substance in order to dissolve into difference, so
Bhabha fails to explain how it is possible for hybridity to undermine identity,
if Bhabha negates the possibility of both a coherent identity and subjectivity
that would give it substance. Easthope even goes on to assert that living in a
state of in-betweenness, of interstices, i.e. between multiple identities, which
is what Bhabha invites us to do, amounts to psychosis.
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The ironic narrator of White Teeth
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory
(Cuddon 1998) maintains that even though irony defies definition,
it always involves a discrepancy between words and their
meaning, or between actions and results, or between appearance
and reality. The two basic kinds of irony to be distinguished are
verbal irony and the irony of situation. Sperber and Wilson agree
with the traditional stance that ironic meaning usually implies
the opposite of what is said, but they add that the motivation
for and the effects of irony are much more varied. Beside the
implication that the content of the said is untrue (what is often
called the substitute of the literal meaning with the figurative
one), there are also ironic questions, ironic euphemisms, and
ironic allusions to the inappropriateness or irrelevance of what
is said, rather than only to its inaccuracy (309).
The list of the most versed English ironists includes Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Byron,
Thomas Hardy, Shaw, Joyce, Evelyn Waugh and Iris Murdoch.
More recently, irony has been the chosen tool of postcolonial
authors, used to destabilize the fixed relations of centre and
periphery, and expose the doubling in hegemonic practices and
discourses. As Linda Hutcheon observes in her seminal work on
irony Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony, irony is a
useful counter-discourse to essentialist theories of race, ethnicity,
gender, class and sexuality9 as well as a “pungent way of writing
back” at the colonial master.10 By breeding ambiguity in the text,
irony exposes the falseness of the colonizer’s “universal truths”,
i.e. his carefully devised propagandist stereotypes of the natives.
In keeping with this postcolonial tradition, it is not inconsequential
that White Teeth abounds in verbal irony at the discourse
level, and that the narrative voice exudes an ironic tone. Irony
generated by the narrator is verbal irony, i.e. the kind of irony that
follows from specific linguistic choices which produce a site of
ambivalence and multiple interpretations. The authorial narrator
relies on pointed commentary, insightful observations, puns and
juxtapositions to produce a comic effect, but more importantly,
to reveal the falseness of truths that Smith’s characters hold on
to or truths they are running away from. Verbal irony is often the
linguistic instrument by means of which the situational irony is
communicated. The narrator’s comments serve to amplify the
irony at the plot level, which may even be lost for the reader
9 Hutcheon, L. (2004) Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony, New
York: Routledge, p. 30.
10New, W. H. (2003) Grandchild of Empire: About Irony, Mainly in the
Commonwealth, Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, p. 59.
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if the narrator were not such an apt ironist. The narrator of
White Teeth is an irresistibly sardonic, yet sympathetic authorial
persona who at times recedes in the background to give floor to
figural narrative situation, i.e. the seemingly unmediated thought
content of the reflector character. Yet the narrator continually
reminds us of herself through comments, evaluations and
jokes, at times addressing the reader, one example being when
she invites the reader not to be jealous of the dashing Millat’s
sexual allure (WT 368). Although the narrator’s irony is mostly
in the service of ridicule, it is not condescending, nor does it
alienate the reader. The narrator, even at her most caustic, retains
a benevolent god-like attitude to the characters, or at least one
of a nosy, but well-meaning neighbour. The narrator’s ironic
disposition is, thus, vital for Smith’s deft characterization, as it
informs the narrative with highly realistic and easy to identify
with paradoxes and delusions of daily realities in a metropolis.
Narrative irony is almost never the simple reversal of meaning
in the novel, i.e. the substitution of the intended meaning with an
utterance that states the opposite. It is nuanced and could roughly
be classified into five loose categories of irony as outlined
by Hutcheon (156): (1) change of register; (2) exaggeration/
understatement (3) contradiction/incongruity; (4) repetition/
echoic mention.11
Change of register is a very common strategy of the narrator,
where trivial, banal or embarrassing situations are expressed in
an overly lofty tone and incongruent formal vocabulary. The
reverse also applies, where colloquial, even vulgar expressions
are mingled with a markedly ceremonial tone to denote a contrast
in perception of the character and his/her reality, or to the
contradiction in the character’s personality. It is often found in
contrasts between the register of a character’s idiom or thoughts
and the register of the narrator’s comments, or psychonarration.
For example, the narrator interrupts a rather colloquial speech
delivered by Shiva to Samad about Samad’s failed affair with
a white Protestant woman, with an ironic remark about Shiva’s
educational improvement:
“ ‘Told you,’ said Shiva, shaking his head and passing Samad a
basket of yellow napkins to be shaped like castles. ‘I told you
not to fuck with that business, didn’t I. Too much history there,
man. You see, it ain’t just you she’s angry with, is it?’ Samad
shrugged and began on the turrets. ‘No man, history, history. It’s
all brown man leaving English woman, it’s all Nehru saying SeeYa to Madam Britannia.’ Shiva, in an effort to improve himself,
11Hutcheon also mentions literalization/simplification as a signal of irony.
However, I was unable to find representative material for this specific feature
in the language of the narrator of White Teeth.
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had joined the Open University. ‘It’s all complicated, complicated
shit, it’s all about pride. Ten quid says she wanted you as a servant
boy, a wallah peeling the grapes” (WT 202).
Two things can be inferred from the narrator’s comment: one is
that although Shiva’s knowledge of history has improved at the
Open University, his language is still markedly working-class.
The other one is the poignant observation that Shiva makes
about the survival of colonial dichotomies and racist power
structures, still alive and well in the early 1990s London setting
of the scene, alerting us to the fact that imperial legacy lives on
to influence people’s professional and romantic lives even this
late in the day. The shift of register correlates with contradiction/
incongruity as another common indication of irony, because the
mismatch of language with the situation, or juxtaposition of
formal and informal register, highlights the discrepancy between
how the characters perceive themselves and the reality of their
position. Shift of register is also important for characterization,
as when one character uses an overly formal and polite language
in a dialogue with another character that speaks in a substandard
London dialect and uses swear words. Such is the scene where
an extremely polished and “more English than the English”
Magid, recently returned from Pakistan, bothers the London
born and bred Irie about some commonalities of Western life
that he finds puzzling, such as the meaning of “shrink to fit”
jeans (WT 428-29).
Contradiction or incongruity at the verbal level occurs when
the narrator’s comment of a situation contains an unexpected
twist or tone that does not coalesce with the circumstances. For
example, there can be an incongruity between the solemnity of
a situation, as it is perceived by a character, and the narrator’s
flippant, even farcical treatment of the subject. Incongruity
occurs, when, for instance, the narrator remarks that the place
that Archie has chosen for his failed suicide is “not a place a
man came to die, but “a place a man came in order to go to
other places via the A41” (WT 3). The ironic tone already hints
that Archie’s plan to end his life will fall through, and that the
situation will have a comical rather than the expected tragic
epilogue. Indeed, in a bizarre turn of events, Archie’s life is
saved by a flock of pigeons who will at that precise moment
defecate on the roof of the local butcher’s, prompting the owner
to step outside and spot Archie as he was trying to gas himself.
A similar discordance between a tragic situation and concepts
from media entertainment is employed in the observation that
Archie’s flashback of his life, as he was preparing to die, was a
“a short, unedifying viewing experience, low on entertainment
value, the metaphysical equivalent of the Queen’s speech”,
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which pokes fun not just at Archie’s pretentions at death, but at
the Queen as well (WT 14). In this scene, the clash of the trivial
with the dignified sparks the ironic effect both at the discourse
level and the plot level, prompting Archie not to take himself or
his troubles too seriously.
Incongruity can also appear in another common form, when
terminology from a scientific field, military jargon, or some
other specific register is applied by the narrator to a situation in
everyday life. For example, a rather ordinary male get-together
at a local pub to drink and discuss the recent developments
is ironically called a summit by the narrator to emphasize the
importance of the meeting for Archie and Samad, who assume
the role of the heads of state, while their small-scale personal
problems are compared to the events of utmost importance for
the country. Such type of incongruity is also found when it is
said that “it took him [Archie] an hour and a quarter just to get
through enemy lines” (9, my emphasis) when he was visiting his
recently divorced wife to reclaim a broken Hoover. The ironic
word choice establishes a comic parallel between a war and
a divorce, which is particularly apt when taking into account
Archie’s and Samad’s poor performance in WWII, for which
these two men must compensate by making mini-wars out of
their commonplace experiences.
Another scene where war rhetoric is employed for an everyday
circumstance is for the tense atmosphere in the hair salon where
black women take their desperate desire to straighten their curly
hair in order to approximate the dominant culture’s ideal of
beauty. The passage vividly describes the extent of pain these
women are prepared to endure for the sake of this, while the
workers at the salon are portrayed as ruthless authorities and
arbiters of truth. The narrator observes:
“In comparison, the female section of P. K’s was a deathly thing.
Here, the impossible desire for straightness and ‘movement’
fought daily with the stubborn determination of the curved
African follicle; here ammonia, hot combs, clips, pins and simple
fire had all been enlisted in the war and were doing their damnest
to beat each curly hair into submission” (WT 275).
The beauty parlour is, contrary to what the concept of this
establishment normally implies, not a place where black women
came to relax and be pampered, but a bloody battle ground
where endurance was put to the test, primarily because of the
excruciatingly painful sensations caused by ammonia on these
women’s heads that are described further in the text and which
make Irie bleed. The warring parties here are ultimately the
English and the African standards of beauty, and the English
side seems to be winning by a landslide. Alghamdi identifies
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an additional situational irony in this scene that “borders on
absurdity”: Irie desires to look less Jamaican and more European
in order to appeal to Millat, but ironically, Millat is not white,
either (Alghamdi 121). It reminds us that both the Pakistani
Millat and the very Carribean looking Irie have internalized
European ideals of beauty which they strive to achieve.
Exaggeration and understatement, the latter frequently in the
form of litotes and euphemisms, make for another effective tool
of irony. In a way, they are a variant of incongruity between
expression and situation, since the language used is either
markedly stronger or weaker than the situation in question
requires. An ironic exaggeration is felt when the enthusiastic
Archie is hailed at the door of a commune party by a youngster
who cultivates a strong dislike of corduroy in which Archie is
dressed from head to foot, so the narrator remarks that for this
young man “to be confronted with a mass of it, at nine a.m. on
the first day of a New Year, is an apparition lethal in its sheer
quantity of negative vibes” (WT 19, my emphasis). Similarly,
the delusions and arrogance of adolescence are ironized with
hyperbolic language when the narrator says of the 15-year-old
Irie:
“She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into
centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke
of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but
carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time
such thought had ever been thunk” (WT 238).
An additional comic effect is provided by the non-standard past
participle of the verb think by analogy with the paradigmatic
forms of comparable verbs. In a similar vein, the narrator
ridicules the Iqbals’ cousin Zinat, who prompts Samad to tell her
his secret, reminding him of her confidentiality and discretion.
The narrator juxtaposes Zinat’s covenant with an explanation
that “whatever was told Zinat invariably lit up the telephone
network, rebounded off aerials, radio-waves and satellites along
the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as
it bounced through the atmosphere of planets removed from
this one” (WT 165-66). On the other end of this spectrum, an
understatement for sex is comically used to denote the difference
between principles and practice in the scene when the teenage
Clara finally meets her high-school crush Ryan Topps on a
mission to convert him to The Church Of Jehovah’s Witnesses,
and the encounter ends with them “fumbling on Ryan’s couch
(which went a good deal further than one might expect of a
Christian girl)” (WT 36, original emphasis). An understatement
is also employed in relation to Samad, to highlight Samad’s
psychological downplaying of his own guilt in kidnapping his
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son, when it is said that Samad was aware “that he had not yet
informed Alsana” about his plans (WT 196, original emphasis).
Repetition and echoic mention reverberate throughout the novel
and they function either as a symbol that is woven through
different plotlines (such as teeth), or as a motif that has a function
in irony. Such is the phrase “dying is no easy trick” which is
ironic in its oxymoronic word choice, but also in its deployment
in every occasion when a character does not “manage” to die
according to a plan. It is first used for Archie’s failed suicide and
later for Archie’s and Samad’s captain Dickinson-Smith, whom,
much to his chagrin, death has evaded for the most of WWII.
Eventually, the captain does not die a heroic English death at the
hands of a foreign enemy, in the tradition of his heroic family,
but shamefully commits suicide.
The most potent echoic mentions, however, are intertextual
quotes from religious texts, such as the Bible and Quran, which
the characters appropriate for their own ends and repeat with a
difference. For example, when the phrase “all things are pure to
the pure” is repeated several times in relation to Samad, each
time it has an added connotation that it takes up from Samad’s
current state of mind and behavior, and these new associations
alter the original meaning of the phrase in the holy text. It is
strategically positioned in the novel to emphasize Samad’s
relativization and trivialization of Muslim doctrines. The irony
is in the fact that Samad desires desperately to be a good Muslim
and demands of his entire family to do the same, yet he eschews
religious principles by interpreting them flexibly when he is
faced with a temptation which he is too weak to resist. The
phrase is first introduced when Samad is attracted to his sons’
music teacher and is repeated by him while he is compulsively
masturbating, where the line serves to justify his sinful behavior
to himself. His distortion of the phrase echoes over the following
pages each time Samad sins, as when he is going to meet Poppy
Burt-Jones. Irony is highlighted by coupling this phrase from a
religious text with another one, a colloquial, typically British
phrase: “can’t say fairer than that”. These two lines alternate
to trivialize Samad’s faith and to ironically foreground Samad’s
split identity between a devout Pakistani Muslim and a secular
modern British man, a split to which he does not admit. Samad’s
reinterpretation of religious principles ultimately point to their
dysfunctionality in the late 20th century, hybrid world of London
that Samad inhabits and shed light on the necessity to redefine
them according to the altered circumstances. The novel creates
an impression that Samad is indeed an honest Muslim who gives
his best to do the right thing but gets stuck in a psychotic mental
divide. Samad’s repetition of a religious line with a difference
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TATJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
and his stretching of its boundaries to accommodate his behavior
should be seen as a constructive effort toward a feasible form
of religion, one that takes into account the divided loyalties of
life in immigration. As immigrant is transformed by foreign
influence, so too their culture has to evolve in order to still have
the power of a universal truth. Tradition can survive only if, in
Deleuzian terms, it is repeated with a difference.
In yet another echoic mention, the narrator quotes St. Paul, “It is
better to marry than to burn (with passion)”, with reference to the
wedding of Archie and Clara. However, this quote is ironized by
means of the one that follows it. The narrator sarcastically adds:
“Good advice. Of course, First Corinthians also inform us that
we should not muzzle the fox while it is treading out the grain –
so, go figure” (WT 46). The narrator ridicules the second quote,
because it commands little authority in the modern world, and
undermines the first quote in the process, making clear she does
not believe that the first quote is such a valid piece of advice
after all. Another prominent intertextual echo is the reading of
Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 in English class that parallels 15-yearold Irie’s musings about her physical appearance. Irie’s hope
of finding a reflection of herself in the sonnet is aborted by
her white English teacher who assures her there is no chance
that Shakespeare dedicated this sonnet to a black, i.e. African
woman.
Repetition has a special place in the narrator’s spectrum of ironic
strategies, as it participates in the theme of the novel, i.e. the
immigrants’ oscillation between the tradition and the modern,
between past and present, between homeland and the new land.
Repetition is what the characters do because they are unable
to tear away from the past and are too entangled in the roots
that bind them to a homeland that is irrecoverable. The narrator
notices that the immigrants are prone to traumatic repetition and
that it probably has to do with their “moving from West to East
or East to West or from island to island”. She continues:
“Even when you arrive, you are going back and forth; your
children are going round and round. There’s no proper term for
it – original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would
be better. A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after
all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals – that they can’t help but
re-enact the dash they once made from one land to another, from
one faith to another from one brown mother country into the pale,
freckled arms of an imperial sovereign. It will take a few replays
before they move on to the next tune” (WT 161-62).
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TATJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
Conclusion
Smith’s deft and varied deployment of irony at the discourse
level in White Teeth brings home the lessons of British struggle
with cultural dilution, loss of homeland, and racism. It targets
the crisis of identity and hybridization of British society in the
last few decades, which is especially observable in the second
generation characters, Magid, Millat and Irie. Narrator’s irony
hybridizes truth, and tells the characters of Smith’s novels they
are not who they seem to be by their skin, it being comparable
with the literal, surface meaning of an ironic utterance. The
secondary, figurative meanings of an ironic utterance run parallel
to the secondary underlying aspects of White Teeth’s characters,
such as the latent British mentality of non-British immigrant
children. The cultural and genetic exchange goes in all directions
in Smith’s multiethnic hodge-podge: the immigrant characters
and their children are anglicized, but the mainstream English
population represented by the Chalfens is also deeply affected by
their interaction with the Iqbals and the Joneses. However, this
is not where the exchange ends, as the immigrants are further
influenced by one another and the genetic and cultural ties are
achieved across minority and majority communities, taking the
form of friendships, antagonisms, professional and love affairs.
By means of verbal irony, the narrator dismantles given truths,
because whatever is read or heard in verbal irony, always points
to something else that goes into its making, which is not readily
visible. Through irony, the stable meanings of origin, home and
identity of the characters are destabilized and made ambiguous.
Irony always contains at least two possible meanings: the literal
one and the figurative one. More often than not, it goes even
further, implying manifold interpretations of one and the same
string of words. The narrator’s ambivalence in White Teeth thus
serves to question the identities of both the minorities and of
the white Britons, and reveals just how “contaminated” these
seemingly discreet groups are by one another. Irony is the
reason behind the success of White Teeth’s social commentary
on cultural politics in contemporary Britain. It is the tool by
which Smith challenges the essentialist basis of her characters’
identification with any ethnic or cultural category, performing
an infinitely important, if not the principal humanist task in the
present day, of exposing the truth of origin as a myth of origin.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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Transnational Metropolis, Toronto: U of Toronto P.
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Westindian and Black British Literature, London: Hansib Publishing.
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New York: Routledge.
“Irony” (1998) The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary
Theory. 5th ed.
Kureishi, H. (1990) The Budha of Suburbia, London: Faber and Faber.
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TATJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
Татјана Милосављевић
Универзитет Albert-Ludvigs у Фрајбургу, Немачка,
Универзитет у Новом Саду, Филозофски факултет –
Катедра за англистику, Нови Сад
ИРОНИЧНИ ПРИПОВЕДАЧ ЗЕЈДИ СМИТ:
ВИШЕ ЛИЦА ИСТИНЕ У МУЛТИКУЛТУРАЛИЗМУ
Сажетак
Иронија се поиграва истином у језику тако што имплицира бар
два значења истог исказа: буквално и фигуративно. Као таква,
иронија је погодно стилско оруђе за уобличавање тема којима се
баве романи Зејди Смит (Zadie Smith). Свезнајући приповедач
Белих зуба (White Teeth) казује причу о савременом животу у
наднационалној метрополи својим неумољиво ироничним тоном,
флертујући са пародијом, разоткривајући њоме вишеслојне
идентитете житеља Лондона 20. века. Измицање значења и
амбивалентност који су суштина вербалне ироније, чине ову
стилску фигуру језичким панданом мултиетничког универзума
романа, који, као и иронија, одолева дефиницији. Ликови који га
настањују, попут ироније, немају јединствено значење и подлежу
вишеструким интерпретацијама. Приповедачева иронија тако
на екстрадијегетском нивоу демонстрира како живот у једној
хетерогеној, мултиетничкој заједници води подривању идентитета
и деконструкцији дубоко укорењених догматских истина субјекта
о себи и неуништивом Другом.
Кључне речи: црна британска проза, приповедни поступак,
иронија, мултикултурализам
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